It was supposed to last a hundred years. The trust set up to protect Eagle Hill was to keep the woodland along the Magothy River safe from developers, but the last of the family who owned the property has died. Its future is unknown.
The developers who would subdivide this legacy have very different aspirations from those my midwestern parents brought to Maryland more than half a century ago. All they wanted was an old house along a river in which to raise their three daughters. What they could afford was Barnstead, an abandoned stable overlooking the river, which they began remodeling into our family home the year I turned three.
Time was told by season at Barnstead. In winter, migrating swans crowded the icy cove with their snowy grace, stark December’s only vain accessory. In summer, thunderstorms billowed across the open water like undulating curtains. Each raindrop, if you watched from the pier, displaced a small crown of water as it met the river, but there was no royalty here. Education had allowed my parents to exceed the usual limitations of their rural childhoods, but my father was still a carpenter’s son, and my mother, a farmer’s daughter.
Together they built a home where my mother would write books and my father would boat, but the sparkling surface of the Magothy obscured unanticipated depths, and the sandy bottom could disappear without warning beneath small bare feet. My sisters and I would learn that sometimes we are parented by a place as much as by those responsible for us, and that dreams, though a less obvious inheritance than the color of our eyes, are also part of our parents’ legacy; both yours, I suspect, and mine.
On my last trip back to Eagle Hill, a 30-minute drive from the town where I live now, I think it is ironic that my kids, who grew up in a world of private schools and yacht clubs, would approach with caution the people who inhabited Eagle Hill.
Mr. Prince and his numerous preschool children rented an old house near the Barn. We seldom saw the Princes, but every so often, Mr. Prince would arrive on our doorstep for a visit. Smoking a pipe, he’d sit on the early American loveseat Mom had slipcovered, while several small muslin bags, tied through his belt loops, twitched and roiled.
Mother served iced tea, and I kept a vigilant eye on those bags, knowing each contained one, if not several, snakes. I thought Mr. Prince was unbearably weird, but my father, if he were alive today, would laugh and assure me he was harmless. Dad was naturally generous and slow to pass judgment. I can’t imagine what they talked about, the snake collector and the hospital administrator, but a kind of midwestern hospitality was at work: no one is turned away from the door, even a man wearing snakes.
A gregarious ladies’ man, my father had a story for every occasion, but I had learned not to always trust his claims. I doubt, for instance, that the pirate Blackbeard once slipped up the Chesapeake as far as the Magothy, but Dad said angry settlers had ambushed the pirate where he had moored in Black Hole Creek. During the most intense part of the battle, Blackbeard and his first mate managed to row ashore with a treasure chest. They walked for 15 minutes, then buried it, returned to the ship, and set sail. So somewhere near Barnstead lay a pirate’s chest of gold, Dad said. But in which direction did they walk? And how fast can two grown men walk carrying a heavy burden between them? As my father began taking longer and longer overnight business trips, I spent an increasing amount of time searching for treasure I thought would save us.
In my father’s absence and my mother’s increasing distraction, I found comfort in practicing self-sufficiency. I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom to resemble a living room. A small table in the center displayed a candy dish for visitors. I liked the idea that I could live on the apples in the orchard, walnuts and mulberries, even the bitter persimmons, and wild plums. I could crab and fish. Barnstead allowed me to believe I could take care of myself. It would never be necessary, of course, but there was a sense of security in the exercise.
For all the tension around me as my parents’ distance grew, I never feared I’d be abandoned, as children often do. Instead, I worried that we would somehow lose Barnstead. I’d overhear my parents talking about developers and zoning laws, and I feared the woods would be lost to tract housing. I even began to worry that a tidal wave could appear at the mouth of the Magothy to sweep away my world.
I prepared for a natural disaster because I didn’t know there were other kinds. My anxiety was well-founded. I had simply attached it to the wrong loss.
As my parents’ dream of a river house full of children neared completion, so did their marriage. After a decade of sheltering my family, an ad was run, and Banstead was sold to the first person who walked in the door.
My affection for Barnstead remains the intense attachment of a child, though I am a woman now. It was the only home in which I had two parents–a family. As I pass the entrance to our lane this afternoon, the house has been swallowed from view by the trees, but I heard it was torn down decades ago, replaced by a McMansion I do not want to see.
I am a trespasser here.
Whatever there was of value, I have taken with me–an appreciation for beauty, for labors of the heart, an unwillingness to pass judgment on their outcome. Now I am the mother who raised three children in the company of a river. Now, I write the books.
Where do you carry the past? That’s not rhetorical, I’m really asking. What part of you is you because of where you’ve been?
My youngest, who lives in DC, is coming home for the weekend. I remember the night, years ago, when I went upstairs to check on her after the babysitter left. She was sound asleep in the twin Jenny Lind bed that had been mine as a child, the book she’d been reading, fallen to the floor. Kneeling to retrieve it, I lifted the white eyelet dust ruffle and noticed that the slats supporting the mattress were unusually narrow.
Raising the fabric further, I realized for the first time that the slats were the rough, white battens that vertically sided the Barn when we found it, eventually replaced by cedar shingles, but saved and put to good use.
Dropping the dust ruffle, I rose and walked out, leaving the legacy of Barnstead beneath new and tender dreams.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
